Increasing Bank Profitability: How to Segment the Business Customer Base
By: Tony Coretto, PNT Marketing Services
Small and medium businesses are some of the most profitable sets of customers for banks to serve. But since they’re all different, how can we know their financial needs? And how do banks meet those needs? Tony Coretto, Managing Partner at PNT Marketing Services, reviews how to quickly, yet thoroughly, perform a segmentation analysis of the business banking customer base. Key success factors include having clear business objectives to support, gaining commitment from key stakeholders, acting quickly and clearly before implementing programmatic responses and tracking results accurately and meaningfully. The paper also offers insights on some simple segmentation schemes for getting started and on the balance between internal and external resources both for data acquisition and for components of the analytic work as well.
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The Quest for Customer Profitability
By: Phil Jarymiszyn, PNT Marketing Services
Many businesses measure profitability by product (or geography) but not by customer. But customers are the fundamental unit of profitability for most successful businesses. In this paper Phil Jarymiszyn, Managing Partner and co-founder of PNT Marketing Services, a leading customer intelligence database marketing services firm, takes a look at how to conduct a Customer Profitability Analysis in an easy to read question and answer format.
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Why Customers Leave and How to Keep Them: Customer Retention in Retail Banking
By: Phil Jarymiszyn and Adam Isler, PNT Marketing Services
Measuring customer retention in banks is more difficult than it might at first appear. It requires an evaluation not just of individual account retention but of the full customer relationship. Furthermore, a variety of data issues can distort the picture, significantly overstating the problem. Banks need to develop accurate customer retention and attrition measurements. Having done so, they need to be able to predict future attrition risks and put programs in place to alleviate them. Often overlooked, a reduction in the balances of retained customers is an important cause of customer “diminishment” and reduced profitability.

Understanding the sources of customer attrition is equally important in crafting effective counter measures. While customer service improvements and loyalty programs can work, the largest segment of lost customers is comprised of customers whose financial services needs have changed without the bank having anticipated or even noticed it. Effective customer retention programs include both metrics and tactics, or programmatic, components that work together to measure, target and act on potential customer attrition.
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Sarbanes-Oxley: Too Much of a Good Thing?
Cushman & Wakefield
Enron. RiteAid.Worldcom. Sunbeam.Global Crossing.Arthur Andersen. By 2002, the investing public was furious over bogus balance sheets and other financial shenanigans. Billions of dollars were being siphoned from the U.S. financial markets, and the public was demanding that something be done.
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Leveraged services utility payment model
By Andy Stewart & Ed Herman, EDS
Payment services represent a significant revenue stream for banks and are a vital link between a bank and its customers. Maintaining that link effectively, however, is proving to be highly problematic. That's because the payments function is forced to operate in a landscape of continually lowering margins, increased competition, heightened customer demand for new products, increasing costs and regulatory-driven changes. Banks have to explore new ways to retain and grow this business, or they risk being squeezed out and losing one of their last remaining franchises. There is a viable solution. The leveraged services utility model provides a structure that will enable banks to stay in the payments business for the long term. Better still, it offers them a way to seize new business opportunities, grow new revenue streams and leverage costs across multiple payment channels.
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